{"id":6524,"date":"2026-06-07T05:25:19","date_gmt":"2026-06-07T05:25:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=6524"},"modified":"2026-06-07T05:25:19","modified_gmt":"2026-06-07T05:25:19","slug":"road-trip-by-mary-kay-andrews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=6524","title":{"rendered":"Road Trip by Mary Kay Andrews"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mary Helen Dunagin spent decades collecting Lladr\u00f3 figurines and quietly stashing twenty-dollar bills in a Chock Full O\u2019Nuts coffee can. After her funeral in Savannah, her two estranged daughters discover she also gave away her life savings to a slick televangelist named Brother Jerome and mortgaged the family house to do it. What she left behind, beyond the debt and wounded pride, is the dusty oil portrait of Lady Geraldine Fitzhugh that hung over their childhood fireplace, and a stipulation that her girls take the coffee can money and use it on an Irish road trip together. The setup of Road Trip by Mary Kay Andrews<\/em> sounds tidy on paper. On the page, it crackles with the kind of family chaos this writer has been pulling off for thirty-odd years without losing the warmth.<\/p>\n

The Dunagin Sisters Steal the Show<\/h3>\n

Maeve is the responsible one. A creative writing professor at Georgia Southern, she rents her place out, moves home, and nurses her dying mother for a year. Therese is the other one. A perpetually broke actress with a vape pen, a beat-up leather jacket, and a habit of vanishing when life gets boring. Andrews builds the sister friction from the first chapter, when Therese stomps into the funeral late wearing Doc Martens and refuses to kneel during Mass. The grudges between them feel earned, with real cruelty in some exchanges and a flickering tenderness the author never overplays.<\/p>\n

The two get pushed together when Therese spots a New York Times article reporting that a portrait identical to their mother\u2019s tacky family heirloom just sold at Sotheby\u2019s for $1.2 million. Suddenly, the painting matters. Suddenly, so does the trip their mother begged them to take.<\/p>\n

County Wicklow, Whiskey, and a Family Tree With Sharp Branches<\/h3>\n

Once the sisters land in Ireland, the book settles into a rhythm that fans of women\u2019s fiction will recognize and welcome. Andrews has a strong feel for place. The fictional village of Tarrymore comes alive through sensory detail: the smoke and lavender scent of Liam Grogan\u2019s leather jacket, the bodhran drum at the Three-Legged Goat pub, sheep blocking country lanes, the soft Wicklow rain that nobody bothers about. None of it reads like a travel brochure. It reads like a writer who actually went there and ate the chips.<\/p>\n

The mystery thread expands as the women track down letters written by their great-grandmother Kathleen, who fled Ireland as a teenager in 1926. Her story, told through correspondence and old church records, runs alongside the sisters\u2019 present-day digging. The connection between the Dunagins and the Anglo-Irish Rossingtons turns out to be far stranger than family lore suggested. The reveal involves an unsolved death at the manor house, an IRA art theft from the 1970s, a sour-faced Rossington descendant named Esme who plays pool with her cocker spaniel underfoot, and a stickpin engraved with a coat of arms.<\/p>\n

Three Things That Work Especially Well<\/h4>\n

The dual timeline.<\/strong> Kathleen\u2019s prologue is one of the strongest chapters in the book and gives the modern plot its emotional anchor. Her letters home, dug out of a cardboard carton by a cousin in a nursing home, do real work on the page.
\nLiam Grogan as a love interest.<\/strong> He is allowed to be ordinary. Slightly balding, charming without being a fantasy, content to fix his own breakfast in a clean kitchen. The romance moves quickly but believably for the genre.
\nThe side characters.<\/strong> Aunt Frannie, Uncle Keith with his Wild Turkey and his 35-millimeter camera, the snippy law-office receptionist Shirley, and the chaotic distillery worker Donal who tries to start a bar fight over Galway Girl all earn their pages.<\/p>\n

Where the Book Stumbles<\/h3>\n

For all its pleasures, Road Trip by Mary Kay Andrews<\/em> is not without rough patches. The villains lean cartoonish. Brother Jerome the silver-haired televangelist is entertaining but feels lifted from a cable movie of the week, and Geoffrey Rossington arrives so late and so obviously sinister that his arc lacks tension. There is also the small matter of how conveniently certain inheritances drop into the sisters\u2019 laps. Some readers will roll with it because the genre invites that. Others will want a tighter screw on the plot.<\/p>\n

The mystery itself, while fun, resolves with one too many neat bows. A poisoning, a strangling, a dog who bites the right ankle at the right moment, all wrapped up before the wedding. Andrews is writing a comfort read, not a Tana French novel, and the shape of her ending fits that promise. Still, the climactic confrontation in the gardener\u2019s cottage feels rushed considering how much careful setup came before.<\/p>\n

Smaller quibbles worth flagging:<\/p>\n

The pacing dips in the middle when the sisters are in Cobh doing genealogical research<\/a>.
\nThe Savannah subplot involving Maeve losing her teaching job to a less qualified male colleague is set up with anger and then mostly abandoned.
\nBrother Jerome\u2019s storyline ends off-page in a way that may frustrate readers who waited for him to face consequences.<\/p>\n

Familiar Andrews Voice, Heavier Heart<\/h3>\n

Readers coming to Road Trip by Mary Kay Andrews<\/em> after Summers at the Saint<\/em><\/a>, Bright Lights, Big Christmas<\/em>, The Homewreckers<\/em>, Hello, Summer<\/em>, The Newcomer<\/em>, Sunset Beach<\/em>, and The High Tide Club<\/em> will find the author\u2019s voice fully intact. Andrews writes in a register that feels like sitting across from a sharp Southern aunt who knows everyone\u2019s business and is not above pouring you a Wild Turkey before she shares it. Her dialogue snaps. Her descriptions of food, specifically the funeral spread of cheese straws and Gebharts tea cakes and watered-down punch, are the kind of writing that makes you hungry for things you have never tasted.<\/p>\n

What separates this book from some of her earlier beach reads is the heavier emotional terrain. Mary Helen\u2019s dementia, the bank teller\u2019s quiet betrayal, the slow grief of losing a parent piece by piece. These passages have weight. They sit alongside the lighter stuff without crushing it. That balance is harder than it looks.<\/p>\n

Who Should Pick It Up<\/h3>\n

Road Trip by Mary Kay Andrews<\/em> will land happily with readers who love:<\/p>\n

Sister stories with bite and reconciliation
\nDual-timeline novels with family secrets
\nBeach reads that also have a body count
\nAnything set in Ireland, especially small village atmospheres
\nComfort fiction with a romance<\/a> threaded through<\/p>\n

It is a less natural fit for those who want their mysteries airtight or their villains shaded in gray. The book wears its heart in plain view and asks readers to come along for the ride.<\/p>\n

Similar Books and Other Mary Kay Andrews Reads<\/h3>\n

For readers wanting more in this vein, the following titles share its sensibility:<\/p>\n

The Lost Bookshop<\/em><\/a> by Evie Woods (Irish setting, dual timeline, family mystery)
\nThe Summer of Songbirds<\/em> by Kristy Woodson Harvey (women\u2019s friendship, Southern setting)
\nThe Forever Summer<\/em> by Jamie Brenner (sisters discovering family secrets)
\nThe Lager Queen of Minnesota<\/em> by J. Ryan Stradal (sisters, inheritance, family business)
\nThe Last Garden in England<\/em> by Julia Kelly (dual timeline, estate setting)
\nThe Last Beach Bungalow<\/em> by Jennie Nash (loss, sisterhood, second chances)<\/p>\n

For Mary Kay Andrews completists who have not gone back to her older catalogue, Savannah Blues<\/em>, Hissy Fit<\/em>, and Little Bitty Lies<\/em> still hold up beautifully and share the spirit of this newest outing.<\/p>\n

The Verdict<\/h3>\n

This is a book to take on a porch swing with a sweating glass of something cold. Road Trip by Mary Kay Andrews<\/em> does not rewrite the rules of summer fiction, but it gives longtime readers what they want: two prickly sisters, one beautiful country, a painting with secrets, and a man who smells of lavender and woodsmoke. The flaws are real but small enough to forgive. The pleasures, much like that coffee can full of twenties, keep showing up when you need them most.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mary Helen Dunagin spent decades collecting Lladr\u00f3 figurines and quietly stashing twenty-dollar bills in a Chock Full O\u2019Nuts coffee can. After her funeral in Savannah, her two estranged daughters discover she also gave away her life savings to a slick televangelist named Brother Jerome and mortgaged the family house to do it. What she left […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6524"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6524\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}